The splintered crack of my egg on the counter sounds like an ending. I raise my hand and tip the runny liquid into the bowl, letting the yolk slip out. It’s bright, orange, unbroken. It’s beautiful, and I want to keep it that way.

Maybe forever.

But I have to whisk it, and with a few turns of my wrist the batter swallows it up. The yolk disappears like it was never there.

I dump the dry ingredients in with the wet, then check my recipe card for the fourth time. Red velvet. My hands know how to do this. Snap the bowl into place on the stand mixer. Stir on the lowest setting until everything barely swirls together. Don’t overmix, or the cake comes out stodgy. I flick the switch at the perfect moment, as the last of the dry, crummy bits dissolve into silk. My hands are good at this. Which is helpful, because the rest of me isn’t really here.

I slap butter-flour paste into four round cake pans, then pour batter into each one. It folds on top of itself like a ribbon. This part usually feels like I’m finishing off a present, and the people who eat the cake later will be able to taste that it’s a gift I made with them in mind. Even if we’re strangers. They’ll taste it, and they’ll know I want them to be happy.

Baking is magic that way.

But I don’t feel like giving presents right now. And I’m not really here because I’m still in her bedroom, wrapped in her towel, shivering as she peers at me without her glasses on and says, “Maybe this isn’t working.”

Like we’re a recipe that isn’t coming together right.

“Syd, do you have a minute to take muffins to the front?” Marisol calls from across the kitchen.

She’s being delicate with me. Marisol isn’t delicate with anything, not even meringues. On a normal day she’d let me know how unacceptable it is that I’m four cakes behind when we’re about to open. She’d remind me that I’m so young, too young to be a full-time baker, even though she’s only a few years older than I am. I do the whole routine in my head. Then I throw my red velvet rounds in the oven.

I grab the muffins, warm and waiting. Drop them in pale wicker baskets, inhaling the comforts of triple ginger, oatmeal and peaches with a brown sugar crumb topping, cherry vanilla strewn with dark chocolate. Each smell hits my nose and burrows into the part of my brain that believes things will be all right. But then I get to the savory breakfast muffins, sharp cheddar and smoky bacon and green onion. Those are W’s favorites.

I don’t know whether I should put one aside for her. I don’t know what she wants anymore.

I head to the front, where Vin is standing at the cash register, settling rolls of change into the little nooks. “Hey, Syd darlin’.” His voice is a dark crackle, his southern accent like a drizzle of honey on top of burnt popcorn. Actually, that sounds good. I start a recipe in my head. Anything to avoid thinking about W.

“Need to talk?” Vin asks, without looking up from the quarters.

“What?”

“Seems like you’re holding something in,” he says. “That’s not good for your constitution.”

I look around the bakery. The front room is filled with early morning light and nooks where people can have private conversations. Beyond that is the wooden porch painted in thick rainbow stripes, and wrought iron tables set in a lush, wild garden. Upstairs is a wide-open community space lined in vintage couches and bookshelves stuffed with queer literature. Vin and Alec have done everything they could to make this place safe and comfortable for someone like me. Every day since I found it on a lucky wander through South Austin, that’s how I’ve felt. Safe. Comfortable.

But right now the Proud Muffin’s magic isn’t working. I feel foul.

And Vin can tell just by looking at me.

“Don’t worry,” I chirp. This isn’t my normal voice. Did I leave it behind at W’s? How much of me is missing?

“It’s my job to worry about all of you,” Vin says. He means it, too. He and Alec treat everyone who work for them like the ever-expanding family that seems standard in Texas. I was born in Illinois. I have parents, a sister, a scattering of aunts, and a single awkward cousin. When I told her I was dating W, she said, and I quote, “That’s a bad idea, but okay.”

“Syd, you still with me?” Vin asks.

I can’t let him think that my feelings about W are shaking my ability to get through a shift. I could lose the best job in the world. No matter how nice Vin and Alec are, I’m the youngest person they’ve taken on as a baker — and it wasn’t a picnic to convince them.

Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, every picnic I’ve been on has felt like a high-stakes situation involving me making lots of food with the likelihood that the entire outing will be ruined by some unforeseen factor.

Convincing them was exactly like a picnic.

“I think I’m hungry,” I say, and my voice sounds as least halfway mine. “Didn’t get a chance to eat this morning. I’m going to grab a Texas Breakfast if that’s okay.” Those are the peachy oatmeal muffins.

Vin nods sagely. He does everything sagely. He rides a motorcycle and listens to endless history podcasts and works out constantly. His tanned white skin is heavily tattooed, mostly with poetry running in all directions, and even though he’s as friendly as Alec, he hides it better — which all adds up to a burly dad vibe. “Take the register for a few minutes, will you? Gemma’s coming in, but I need to run to the bank and get change. Y’all keep going through my singles like this is a strip bakery.”

Marisol would have laughed at that. I just nod at Vin, completely mature and trustworthy.

Saturday is our second-busiest morning of the week, and the moment Vin opens the doors customers start flying in. The black coffee flock comes first, mostly teachers from the Texas School for the Deaf down the street. You’d think they would sleep in on the weekend, but people get attached to their morning caffeine rituals. I sign the basics back and forth and pour brown liquid into cups. Gemma comes through the front door just in time for the morning muffin rush. She throws her I’m a Proud Muffin tank top over a basic black one. Her box braids swing and her track shorts shimmer as she moves at high speed, making sure the espresso machine is always gleaming and ready to go.

“Can you stay up front until Vin gets back?” she asks.

I hesitate for just a second. “Sure.” She doesn’t need to know how behind I am in the kitchen.

I make myself look busy, keep my head down, but some of our regulars aren’t deterred by things like body language and how many cakes I still have to pop out before noon. They’re going to make small talk at any cost.

Jessalee, one of our day-old-pastry hunters, pushes through the basket of rejects for the least squished croissant. “Syd! I haven’t seen you out here in weeks!”

“Baking, baking, baking,” I say.

“Words, words, words!” she responds brightly. She’s always writing on the porch.

Jessalee’s youngish, but she wears boxy vintage dresses and lace slips, as if her entire life is a rehearsal for being an old lady. Even her hair, which she dyes Easter-egg pastels, has a throwback feel to it. Today it’s the color of a blueberry, pieces flying out of her bun as she holds up evidence of victory: a perfectly wrapped almond croissant. “How are you, sweetie?” she asks, flushed with the rare find.

“I’m fine,” I say, testing the words on my tongue. They’re not as bitter as I thought they would be. Maybe I am fine. W and I had a fight. A marathon fight. Our first real one. But couples do that, right?

Maybe this makes us more of a couple than we were before.

Jessalee reverently sets the almond croissant on the counter as I ring up her usual latte, which Gemma is already making, head down, looking at anything but Jessalee.

“How is W?” Jessalee asks with the delighted smile of a stranger who knows exactly one personal thing about you.

“W is good,” I say. “I think she’s great, actually.” That was one of the main points in our fight. I think she’s great, and she thinks I like having a girlfriend too much to notice that sometimes she isn’t.

“That pretty girl of yours coming around today?” Mr. Trujillo asks, nosing in with his large coffee. I pour the thinnest trickle of almond milk into his cup, even though I know he likes more.

I have no idea what W is doing. Where she’s going, what piece of her day she’s delighted about or dreading. This is the first time in a very long time that I don’t know every little detail.

The door swings open. It’s Vin with a black zippered bag from the bank down the street. He looks off, like the heat is getting to him. I’ve never seen that happen before, even when the temperature slides up past 110 degrees, creeping toward the certain doom of 120. “Syd, get to the kitchen,” he says. “Give me a special to write on the board, get everyone out here excited.”

I give an oversized nod, which turns out to be a good way to keep tears inside someone’s face.

“Brownies,” I say. “I’m making brownies.”

Vin doesn’t show any surprise, just chalks Syd’s Unexpected Brownies on the specials board and sets the price at two-fifty.

Brownies are simpler than what I usually go for. They require three things: a single bowl, a sturdy spoon, and a dedication to dark chocolate. Brownies are also W’s favorite. I’ll set one aside and bring it to her later. She’ll see it, take a single bite, and everything will melt back to okay.

“Are those red velvets going to be finished soon?” Marisol asks the second I set foot in the kitchen.

“Damn.”

I forgot them while I was up front. Marisol pulled the rounds out of the oven for me, but I have to finish off those cakes before I start anything new. Even though they’re a little warm to frost, I rush through the steps. Crumb coat first. A thicker layer of cream cheese frosting with the offset spatula, one generous swipe at a time. I pipe a shaky Happy Anniversary Bob and Barb and squish a few half-hearted roses along the border. It looks like a lie, like the cake knows that I didn’t want Bob and Barb to be happy until I know that W and I can be happy, too.

“Done,” I shout.

Then I rattle around the kitchen, gathering what I need for brownies, setting some ingredients in my favorite mixing bowl and nestling the others along my arm. This feels better already. This is baking for me, not Bob and Barb or the regulars. This is baking because my hands are twitching and my heart is raw and I need to get out of my head, even if it’s just until the timer goes off.

The second I dip my measuring cup into the flour, there’s a knock at the back door.

“Harley,” Marisol announces while boxing up her cakes. She slides cardboard panels together, sharp and exact.

“Right,” I mutter. “Of course.”

I always answer the door for Harley.

I settle my brownie makings on one of the long wooden tables and hurry for the back door. For the first time, I wonder if I look like someone who’s been fighting with their girlfriend. How blotchy is my face? How curdled is my expression?

As soon as the door opens, I check the pin on Harley’s bag: he.

I look down at my feet. Harley’s sneakers dance lightly, back and forth. It feels like we’re at a party and my smile forgot to show up.

“Here for deliveries,” he finally says, twisting the front lock of his hair. He’s always roughing up his reddish-brown curls to revive them after they’ve been smashed down under a bike helmet. Harley is a single inch taller than me, with brown eyes that I can clock for their exact chocolate content. Sixty percent. Semisweet.

“You’re always here for deliveries,” I say.

“You don’t know,” he says with an elaborate shrug. “Someday I might be here for a completely different reason.”

On most mornings Harley takes the cardboard boxes out of my arms, talks to me in the alley for two to five minutes while balancing the weight on his bike baskets, and then takes off. Today I haven’t brought the boxes to the door, so he follows me inside and I point out where everything is stacked. Then I go back to my brownies, and Harley keeps following. He leans over the baking table as I spread out my ingredients.

“W and I got into an argument,” I say without Harley even asking. I’ve spent hours avoiding the truth, stepping around it. Now I’m pouring sugar and telling the cute bike delivery person.

The weird part is, Harley already knows more than a little about my relationship with W. Not that I go out of my way to tell him about my personal life, just that it’s easy to talk to someone you see for two to five minutes at a time.

“Was it a big fight?” he asks.

I dump the sugar.

“How long did it last?”

I poke at the sugar with my wooden spoon. I won’t add it to the batter until the chocolate melts.

“Hours.”

“How many?”

“Eight?” That math does not make me feel better. Math has always been on my side in this relationship. W and I have been together for almost four years. We’ve had zero fights — until yesterday. We’ve kissed thousands of times. We’ve been each other’s dates at twelve school dances and two weddings. We’ve named our future kids, then changed the names three times.

“What did you fight about?” Harley asks.

“Nothing. Everything.” I can’t remember how it started. It kept stretching and taking up more of the night, and by the time I tried to trace the whole thing back to an origin point, it was lost in a haze of held-back tears.

“How did it end?” Harley asks.

“I had to leave for work.”

“Huh.”

Harley drums his fingers on the wooden tabletop. Long fingers, blunt nails. “Where did you fight for eight hours?”

Does that matter? “It started at the Thai place on South First, you know the one with the great patio?” Harley nods. “They have those long tables that you share with other people. They call them community tables, although I’ve seriously never seen anyone spontaneously become best friends at a restaurant just because they were squished together like that. Anyway, W and I were sort of half fighting over our food and half pretending it wasn’t happening so the people on a first date next to us wouldn’t notice.” I’d felt like a bad representative of coupledom. “W’s parents went on a last-minute business trip and my parents thought some of our other friends were there, which they were at the beginning of the night, but by the time we went out to dinner it was just us so we decided to go back to her place —”

“Full parental workaround,” he says. “Got it.”

“And the fight kept going, but then we . . .” I make a sort of rolling motion with my spoon.

“You spooned.”

“We had sex.”

Harley’s eyes go a little wild, like I really threw him off the scent with the whole spoon thing. “Ohhh.”

“I thought everything was better, but it wasn’t, and by the time it got really bad, we were in the shower. We stayed there until the water got cold and we had to turn it off, but we weren’t done fighting so we just stood there wet and cold.”

“She broke up with you in the shower?” Harley shaves his voice down to a whisper. “After sex?” His current level of eyebrow intensity makes him look so worried that I want to hug him. Then I remember that I’m the one with the problem. “Please tell me it wasn’t your first time,” he adds.

“Fighting?”

Harley squints at me. “No. Your first tiiiiiime.”

“Oh.” I check to make sure nobody else is paying attention, then shake my head. “We didn’t break up, though. We fought.”

Harley blows out a dramatic breath, and Marisol shoots us both a look over her shoulder. Harley and I inch a little closer to each other. “What you described doesn’t sound like a fight.”

“What does it sound like?”

He winces, looking sincerely uncomfortable with what he’s about to say. “Being dumped.”

“Oh,” I say, grabbing the baking chocolate, hacking into the bar. “Oh. Okay. And you’re sure about this, why?”

“Because I’ve been dumped,” Harley says apologetically. “I know what it looks, feels, walks, and talks like.”

“Have you ever been told ‘maybe this isn’t working’?” I ask without looking up from my knifework. “As part of the dumping process?”

“Oh, sure. If you’re looking for a list of generic ingredients, that’s the flour.”

I laugh, but it doesn’t sound like laughing; it sounds like chocolate snapping into pieces.

“You’re telling me I didn’t just get broken up with, I got the grocery store box mix equivalent of being broken up with.”

“Did you just carve a W into that chocolate?” Harley asks.

I look down and there it is: a big, sharp W. I don’t remember doing that.

Marisol comes over, bumping my hip with hers, putting an arm around my shoulder. “Harley, can you come back after your first round of drop-offs? We got behind on some orders this morning.”

“Sure.” He flicks a worried glance at me as he backs away. Then he spins and starts loading his arm with cake boxes.

Marisol squeezes me to her side. “Let’s bake,” she whispers, and I can’t tell if this is a threat or a really nice suggestion.

Marisol is one of the best bakers in all of Austin. She’s also the Proud Muffin’s resident heartthrob. A steady stream of her significant and not-so-significant others hangs around, hoping to see her stride out of the kitchen in her white tank top, dark hair slicked back, arms strong from carrying enormous bricks of butter. Marisol has probably endured a dozen relationships ending while we’ve worked together, and I’ve never once seen her break. Maybe I should ask her for advice.

No. No.

I’m not breaking.

W and I aren’t broken.

I shrug away from Marisol. She smells like cinnamon and hair wax and it lingers in a weirdly comforting way. “Almost done with the special,” I say through a thick, pre-crying throat. “I’ll get the rest of the cakes and you do lunch rolls, okay?”

Marisol nods.

Harley peeks around the tower of cake boxes in his arms and gives me a quick, bright “See you tomorrow!”

Tomorrow is Sunday. W and I have a standing date to split an eggs Benedict at Counter Café after my early shift. Then we usually walk down to the Alamo Drafthouse and cram two movies into the hottest part of the day, drinking brown sugar lemonade, kissing every time a character makes a dramatic exit. Her lips tart and sugary. Her hands cold from clutching the glass.

I have brownies to make, but I can’t go another minute without knowing. I pull my absolutely-banned-from-the-kitchen phone out of my back pocket.

Did we just break up?

W is quick to respond if she’s anywhere near her phone. So when she doesn’t, I know she’s busy, or she’s angry. Either of those is okay. She’s cooling off; she’ll text me back when she’s ready to talk.

I get back to my brownies, whisking the thin batter. Just as I’m about to slide them in the oven, I hear a commotion in the front. This sort of minor celebration happens anytime someone we all know enters the bakery.

I get the sweaty cold sense that I know exactly who walked in.

Her lemony voice cuts through everything. That same voice found me at a party in eighth grade, when I was new in Austin and she was newly out. She asked if I wanted to skip the game of spin the bottle and just kiss. I said yes. I waited an excruciating two days until homeroom on Monday and asked her out, and she said yes. By the end of that first date, she asked me if I wanted to skip the part where we weren’t sure about each other and just be a couple. I said yes. There’s hope in my throat, swelling until I can’t breathe around it.

“Is Syd here?” W asks.

Gemma yells, “Syd!” without coming back.

It feels like a long walk from the kitchen to the front counter.

The last time I saw her, she was as wrecked and naked as I was. Now W is wearing a low-cut black T-shirt, her perfectly distressed jeans, and the black cowboy boots with the turquoise details. It’s early spring, but her freckles are already out in force. Her lips are a straight line, betraying nothing. I can’t see her eyes. Her sunglasses are firmly on, even though she’s inside.

I wish I could go back to not knowing the contents of her day.

“I can’t believe you had to ask me that,” she says, skipping right over any kind of greeting. But W isn’t whispering, and I take that as a good sign. Nothing we’re saying is a secret. We’re two people who love each other, two people who had an argument and are now talking in normal voices.

“Ask . . . what?” Like there’s any other question in the world right now.

W looks around as though she’s memorizing the Proud Muffin. Like she has to re-create this place from scratch later.

That’s when I realize she’s leaving.

Everything slows down to syrup.

“We broke up.” She pauses, then says it slightly louder. “We’re not together, Syd.”

She turns away from me, giving Gemma a hug over the counter. They know each other. They’re friends. W is friends with everyone, but she’s with me. At least, she was until a few hours ago. Now she’s pointing at the basket filled with savory muffins, the ones that she likes to douse in hot sauce until she can barely taste anything.

“I’ll take these to go.” She looks right at me and says, “I don’t think I’ll be back for a while.”

 

4 oz unsweetened chocolate, broken up (I mean, it’s right there, how did I not see this coming?)

½ cup (1 stick) butter

1 cup granulated sugar

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

½ tsp sea salt

⅔ cup all-purpose flour

1 cup dried cherries

Powdered sugar for decorating

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter your pan before starting. This works best in an 8 x 8 pan for a single batch, though you can double and use a 9 x 13 pan if you’ve been left at the altar or something.

Carve the name of your ex into the chocolate.

In a microwave, melt the butter and chocolate in a large bowl in 30-second intervals, stirring between each. If your breakup has driven you to a tiny cabin on a mountaintop or somewhere equally dramatic where there’s no microwave, you can do this step in a double boiler, or fake one with a small metal bowl over a simmering pot of water, stirring until the butter and chocolate mixture is smooth.

Let the melted chocolate mixture cool slightly. Whisk in the sugar, then the eggs one at a time, the vanilla, and salt. Toss the cherries lightly in the flour before folding them both in. This coats them so they don’t all sink to the bottom when you bake. Stir all the ingredients until the moment when the white disappears and everything becomes the same gooey dark brown: be careful not to overmix.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan, and spread the top until even, remembering when your relationship looked shiny and unbroken just like this. It’s a good thing that your fingers are covered in brownie goo or you might be tempted to text your ex again.

Don’t.

Bake for 25 to 30 minutes.

Test for doneness with a toothpick, fork, or cake tester. It should come out JUST clean. Let cool slightly. Slice the brownies generously. Cut a heart into a sheet of parchment paper and sift powdered sugar over the cut-out shape on top of each brownie, creating a series of perfect hearts.

Misery loves to look pretty.